May 12, 2017

Changes May be Coming to the Decades-old EB-5 Visa Program

Ted Zangari vividly remembers the reaction of investors and developers when he first started explaining the EB-5 program.

“The entire development community knows about this money source by now,” he said. “But in the early days, as we would go through the litany of what dollars were available from where and we would explain the EB-5 program — essentially, foreign investment in exchange for the investor and his or her family receiving visas to come into the U.S. — the reaction of clients, without exception, was, in a word, incredulous.

“That’s still the visceral reaction of the average person outside of developers — ‘What? You mean someone can buy their way into the country, not go through the usual lawful channels, but literally write a check and come in?’ ”